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Comment by randallu | Hacker News Reader

JSC has a very stable external API and performs competitively (for some reason it always beats V8 on DOM manipulation stuff -- I don't know why v8/chrome haven't been able to make more efficient bindings).

It doesn't build outside of the WebKit tree, though... (but there are some scripts which should in theory build only jsc; I think they want all the deps to WebKit, etc, however).

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JSC should build cleanly on its own (e.g. no dependencies on anything on top of it.) It's possible some of the build scripts have developed a bizarro dependency on other portions of the repo, but we'd happily take patches to fix those issues.

As far as APIs, JSC has provided a completely API and ABI stable C API for 7-ish years, and there's an ObjC API built on top of that now. Unfortunately the nature of C APIs for interacting with language runtimes makes it somewhat clunky and hard to use perfectly - C++ makes this easier as you can make types with constructors and destructors to make a lot of the otherwise manual work (ref()/deref(), etc) entirely automatic. Unfortunately C++ makes it easy to make an API that has a stable interface, but still isn't ABI stable.

People build jsc on its own on mac, but I have never been successful on linux. Hopefully there is some way though? I've been forced to build all of WebKit-gtk.

A bigger concern for me personally is that the jsc shell lacks typed arrays, https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119828

edit: i should have said 'full spec for typed arrays', see the linked issue

The typed arrays should be available in trunk, haves you checked recent trunk?

I believe the "need all of webkit-gtk" was a pile of sadness in build-jsc + automake that may have been fixed recently. I'm sure Zan, Xan, or Michel would be happy to help if it's still borked. There are _some_ platform requirements that make a generic "linux" not work, as we build on the platform support libraries for threads, unicode, etc so JSC may have random looking dependencies on such

Sorry if i wasn't clear, I tried trunk when I filed that issue, last week - typed arrays are there, but they are missing things like set() and subarray() (mentioned in the issue).

I am not even sure how to try to build jsc by itself on linux, i couldn't find any instructions (online or in the dir)? All online discussions i found said i need to build all of webkit.

Have you tried ToT trunk? We moved the entire TA impl into JSC itself last week and just accepted the semantic changes necessary for non-WebIDL types.

Tools/Scripts/build-jsc _should_ build just jsc.

Well I spent around 5 minutes downloading and trying to build, immediately hitting this wall on Windows: http://i.imgur.com/J9Gs6wb.png

Seems that nobody has tried that in a long time, or who knows why it references something in C:\tools

Yuck. If you are interested, perhaps a directory junction would get it far enough along to fix the problems.

From the project root, copy the files in

`\WebKitLibraries\win\tools\vsprops`

Into `C:\tools\vsprops`

Worked for me.

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